Notes on the Design and Development of the HP Research Awards Series
This text describes process of developing a series of three publications beloning to the HP Research Awards Series. Here we discuss the editorial strategy adopted and the design and the technical choices orienting the design of the series and of the single publications.
WdKA Research Awards
In 2015, the Willem de Kooning Academy launched an award for 'art and design as critical research'. The award is meant to give exposure to the most valuable "experimental and critical research in form of art and design projects". Besides three different prizes in money, the award include the publication of the winning projects. The way this publication happens reflects the idea of art and design as research, so that the publication process becomes an opportunity to investigate experimental techniques and processes. Research Publications and publication as research.
Among the projects awarded in the past there is, which publication was designed by ??? and open school designed by Template, a system that allows to directly ...
The 2016 Winners
For the 2016 edition of the WdKA Research Prize, we were asked to develop three hybrid publications for the winning graduation projects. The goal was to push for a visual approach of the hybrid publishing workflow, strive for on the one hand more experimental outputs and on the other create a recognizable research publication line which can be easily accessed and archived.
Two Versions
We summarized this brief on visuality/materiality and accessibility. In order to address these needs, we conceived an hybrid publication made of two interrelated versions: a standard one and a custom one. The standard version is meant to respond to the following criteria:
- consistency
- accessibility
- archiving
The custom version responds to the following ones:
- specificity
- visuality
- interactivity (broadly speaking, e.g. non-trivial ways to navigate a printed publication)
Furthermore, we decided to use an electronic format for he standard version, so to take advantage of the modularity of code and its templating possibilities. Complementary to that, the custom version would be print in order to take advantage of the visual and haptic qualities of a paper publication.
EPUB
When it comes to choose a format for an e-publication, the EPUB might seem the obvious choice. But we had some doubts on it actually fitting the criteria of accessibility. Reading the principles guiding the development of the format, accessibility is a core issue:
"A key concept of EPUB is that content presentation should adapt to the User rather than the User having to adapt to a particular presentation of content"
In other words, instead of imposing its features, an EPUB file tries to do its best in each possible situation, from narrow E Ink readers to multi-touch tablets. Furthermore, its inner architecture is crystal clear and easily accessible.
However, the poverty of the ecosystem surrounding the EPUB format, hinders accessibility. This poverty concerns both the tools for creating EPUBs (Calibre, Sigil) and the ones to read them (iBooks, ...).
This is particularly true when it comes to ebooks with peculiar designs, since the absence of a respected standard among reading software implies the necessity of a series of hacks to create the most basic layouts.
EPUB means frustration. Both for the developer, the designer and the reader.
Silvio could experience this directly by giving a series of workshops, together with interaction designer Jacopo Pompilii entitled The Mobile is the Massage, whose goal was to we’ll need to actively interpret the peculiar graphic solutions o self-reflexive artists' books in order to produce an EPUB specifically designed for mobile devices.
A frequent sight while developing EPUBs. (source)
This state of thing reminded us of a previous project of the WdKA entitled I Would Rather Design a Poster Than a Website. Similarly, many people in the target audience of the HP Research Award Series would rather read any format than an EPUB.
EPUB
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Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
